


Frankenstein, the Newt, and Vi

by orphan



Series: Frankenstein and the Newt [1]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Kaiju Newton Geiszler, M/M, POV Original Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-23
Updated: 2015-12-27
Packaged: 2018-05-08 14:36:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 18,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5501048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan/pseuds/orphan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>“Um. Hi? My name’s Vivian Lee. I’m supposed to, um...” Vi looks down at the phone in her hands, at the email showing on the screen. “I’m newly assigned to the K-Science Lab? I was supposed to ask for Doctor Gottlieb?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The guy behind the reception desk looks up with an expression hovering somewhere between fear, pity, and disgust. “Oh, man,” he says. “Who’d you get killed to wind up posted to K-Lab?”</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. "I won’t have this lab filling up with-- with glory hunters and kaiju groupies."

**Author's Note:**

> I am literally not even in this fandom I'm so sorry I just got this silly idea for a fic because I'm really not kidding when I say nerds/monster boys is my OTP.
> 
> I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [I just wanna let you know you let me down](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOH15_pqWZ4)...

It starts off badly and gets worse from there.

“Um. Hi? My name’s Vivian Lee. I’m supposed to, um…” Vi looks down at the phone in her hands, at the email showing on the screen. “I’m newly assigned to the K-Science Lab? I was supposed to ask for Doctor Gottlieb?”

The guy behind the reception desk looks up with an expression hovering somewhere between fear, pity, and disgust. “Oh, man,” he says. “Who’d you get killed to wind up posted to K-Lab?”

Vi blinks. “What?” She’d been so excited when she’d gotten the call, four weeks ago now. Fresh out of university, straight into her dream job, and this is not the reception she was expecting.

“Want my advice?” says the receptionist. “Run. Going AWOL and getting court marshaled will be the easy out, compared to where you’re going.” He sounds so serious, leaning across the desk as if confiding a secret. Vi tries to hold her smile, but there’s a feeling in her stomach like the earthquake from a kaiju’s footsteps, and this time it’s not purely from excitement.

* * *

“No. Absolutely not. I’ve said this a thousand times and I’ll say it a thousand more! K-Lab is fine. We don’t need some— some— some _girl_ in here getting in our way!”

It’s been nearly an hour since Vi met Doctor Gottlieb and nearly fifty minutes since the shouting started. Not at her; Gottlieb hasn’t said a single thing to her, beyond the initial, “No. Absolutely not!” Since then, he’s been on the phone with someone Vi suspects is well and truly above her pay grade. She doesn’t know who and hasn’t had the opportunity to ask, in between the shouting. Instead, she’s been standing quietly in the corner of the lab, bag clutched against her chest, trying not to cry.

This was not what she expected from her first day.

At least she’s in K-Lab. It’s exactly as incredible as she always imagined it would be, a mad science theme park of humming machines and preserved kaiju parts in jars and huge whiteboards filled with scribble. There’s also a keyboard—the musical kind, not the computer kind, although there are those, too—and a huge pool of inky black water.

The water feeds into the ocean, that she does know. Via a tunnel that runs under the newly upgraded Shatterdome. There’s a rack of scuba equipment next to the pool, though it looks decidedly unused, and Vi is inspecting this—leaning over the pool, trying to fathom its purpose—when the kaiju appears.

It’s not a big kaiju, so much so that Vi wonders if it could be classed as one at all. At least, she will wonder this, later. When the thing isn’t emerging from the black water beneath her face, all glowing eyes and enormous teeth. It comes up so fast it nearly headbutts her, and Vi screams, tumbling backwards with a crash that sends her falling into a cart of samples. They go down and she goes down with them, right onto hard Lino. Hard and wet, and getting wetter from the maybe-kaiju that’s emerged from the pool now, is looming over Vi, claws extended.

 _It has six limbs,_ is her first, slightly hysterical, thought. Two it’s walking on, two huge ones with claws and fins emerging from its shoulders. And two more, smaller, more hand-like, tucked against its chest. Six limbs and six eyes, glowing bright blue against dark grey skin. Its tongue also glows, and its gums, and the cracks between the plates of its armoured skin and—

“Yes, I know it’s a girl!”

—and Doctor Gottlieb is coming back over, limping heavily, phone still held up against his ear.

“See!” he says into the phone. “This is exactly what I’m talking about. All this… this shrieking and— and crashing and carrying on!”

The tiny kaiju is carrying a satchel. In its small hands. She can see silver sample canisters emerging from the top.

It’s also, she realises, offering her a hand up. One of the big claws.

Its skin feels… strange against Vi’s own. Wet and rubbery, rough on the back but the palms are soft. It helps her up off the floor while Doctor Gottlieb is still shouting into his phone, and for a moment Vi finds herself eye-to-eye with a monster. It must be only about twelve feet long, from its snout to its tail, but it walks hunched so it doesn’t stand much higher than six. It is _absolutely fascinating_. Vi’s heard the rumours, because everyone has—tame kaiju, kept secret by the Corps—but she never thought she’d actually get to see one, let alone on her first day.

The kaiju tilts its head, mouth opening slightly, tongue lolling. Vi’s pretty sure it’s smiling. Then it huffs, and lumbers off. Over to the far side of the lab, where it starts unpacking its sample containers, and Vi is left wondering what the hell she’s just signed up for.

* * *

Doctor Gottlieb eventually stops shouting, but that doesn’t mean he gets any friendlier. He’s there every morning when Vi shows up to the lab, hunched over a tablet or examining some projected schematic. She smiles and says hello and he huffs and scowls and that’s about as far as their relationship goes. It would be miserable, but thankfully Vi isn’t Doctor Gottlieb’s lab assistant. She’s here to do biology, which means she works for Doctor G1.

Doctor G1—who calls Doctor Gottlieb “Dr. G2”, an Vi giggles although doesn’t mention this out loud—has no other name that Vi can ascertain, and seems to be posted in some other lab. He’s a very active emailer, however, and seems like a nice guy—Vi is almost certain he’s a guy—and that makes work… better.

 _dont worry about g2,_ he tells her, the afternoon of her first day. _he just doesnt like change_

 _I don’t want to be in his way,_ Vi writes back. _Working in K-Lab is a dream come true for me. I don’t want to mess it up._ She wonders if this is over-sharing. Doctor Gottlieb is a living legend, a scientific hero. Vi had heard he was… eccentric. But she doesn’t want the guy to hate her.

 _your doin fine dont worry bout it,_ comes the reply from Dr. G1. _ill talk to hermherm later if you want. get him to lay off a bit_

Vi pauses, looks guiltily over her laptop to where Doctor Gottlieb is glued to his own screen, steadfastly pretending she doesn’t exist.

 _No,_ she types back. _It’s okay. I’ll just have to win him over with my shining personality. :)_ It takes five times of adding then deleting the smilie before she decides to keep it.

 _good luck,_ comes the reply. _offers open any time you need it :P_

Vi decides to take it as a challenge.

* * *

The thing is, no one mentions the kaiju. It’s obviously there, in the lab, every day. Doctor Gottlieb talks to it almost constantly. He just… never mentions it to Vi, and honestly Vi’s too afraid of him to ask. Vi is not afraid of Dr. G1, but he never mentions the kaiju, either, which makes Vi think maybe he doesn’t know about it? Or maybe he does, but it’s some sort of classified secret they’re not supposed to talk about over the email? Either way, she doesn’t want to be the one spilling top secret info (or whatever), and so the beast goes unremarked.

It takes her nearly a month at the Shatterdome to figure out the thing is called The Newt, and the only reason she works this out is because she overhears some pilots referring to K-Lab as being the domain of “Frankenstein and the Newt”. Vi’s heart sinks a little at the term. Sttrained relationship with Doctor Gottlieb aside, she _loves_ working in K-Lab. It’s everything she used to dream of at university, and more; learning the kaiju from the inside out, their biology, their composition. Being close enough to almost touch…

Vi does not touch the Newt, beyond that first day. She almost did, when she came in early to find it curled up asleep underneath (or partly underneath) the keyboard. She’d been crouching down, trembling fingers inches from its carapace, when a walking cane had slapped her hand aside.

“Do you often grope people when they’re sleeping?” Doctor Gottlieb had hissed, expression contorted and vicious. Vi had been so humiliated she hadn’t been able to look at him for a week.

At least the work is interesting. And useful. Dr. G1 has her studying the regenerative properties of kaiju cells, seeing if they can be applied to human medicine.

 _think about it,_ he’d told her. _the kaiju don’t age, don’t get sick, can heal from all but the most extreme injuries. They’re artificially created beings which means someone made them like that. if we can reverse engineer that technology ourselves, think of what it would do for humanity!!!!_

It’s definitely, Vi thinks, at least four exclamation marks worth of exciting. But first they have to figure out how to neutralise the side-effects, a.k.a. the kaiju virus.

_we know how to turn people into monsters, but even as a last resort its not considered an ~acceptable ~outcome_

Vi looks up as she reads this. The Newt is over the other side of the lab, stretched out with its front half underneath Doctor Gottlieb’s desk. The Doctor has his bad leg stretched out and propped up on the kaiju’s back, between the spines, like it’s something he’s done a thousand times before. Vi has seen the file photos of tests with the kaiju virus; a second generation Kaiju Blue, one that mutates as well as poisons. There’s a vaccine, if people would take it, but Vi’s seen the effects and it is not pretty. It occurs to her to wonder if that’s what happened to the Newt; whether it was Doctor Gottlieb’s pet dog or some kind of lab animal. Maybe that’s why he keeps it around. Some of the pilots keep pets on base; she supposes this isn’t different.

The theory is supported when she walks in on Doctor Gottlieb taking a biological sample from the Newt. It’s hooked up to some sort of machine, iridescent blue blood draining through a tube and into a container. Doctor Gottlieb is petting the Newt as he watches the procedure, hands running down the creature’s neck as it makes a contented whining halfway between a purr and a dolphin’s bark. Vi is pretty sure neither of them have seen her.

“—not have to be ‘nicer’,” Doctor Gottlieb is saying. “I don’t care if she’s a brilliant researcher, we’ve been doing this alone for years. No one was interested before they knew who we were, so you’ll have to forgive me for not trusting their motivations now that they do. I won’t have this lab filling up with— with glory hunters and kaiju groupies. Or worse!”

Vi feels her heart clench. He’s talking about her, she realizes. To Dr. G1, by the sound of it, and Vi can’t see a phone, but most of Doctor Gottlieb is obscured by the hulking, placid body of the Newt. Its glow ripples, and Vi knows she should leave. Leave, or announce herself; something to let Doctor Gottlieb know she’s there. She shouldn’t eavesdrop, she—

“I am not _jealous_! Don’t be ridiculous, you overbearing lump of genetic waste. What would I possibly be—” He’s cut off.

He’s cut off because the Newt has moved, has tilted its head and opened its mouth, and its long, glowing tongue is pushing its way down Doctor Gottlieb’s throat.

Vi has one moment of pure, heart-stopping panic. Fight or flight. Because the Newt has never been aggressive, has never so much as growled at her or at Doctor Gottlieb and yet here it is, attacking the Doctor except…

Except Doctor Gottlieb doesn’t look very attacked. Not with the way he arches his head back, body going slack as the Newt’s inner arms come up to hold him, to run down his sides and… and it looks like a kiss. A passionate kiss, a kiss between lovers. Except it _can’t_ be, can it? It must be something else, some kaiju thing Vi doesn’t understand. Either way, she needs to leave. Whatever’s going on, it isn’t for her to see.

* * *

She spends the next twenty minutes just walking around the ‘Dome. Shellshocked, but it’s such a common expression no one so much as mentions it.

When she finally gets the courage to return to the lab, both Doctor Gottlieb and the Newt are missing. So Vi puts her head down, and gets to work.

* * *

It’s nearly ten by the time Doctor Gottlieb reappears. He nods at her as he comes in, his expression almost a smile. “Ms. Lee.” He has a tiny smudge of blue on his cheek.

Vi blushes, and can’t meet his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh god no it's my [SECRET WEEABOO PAST](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NezBfEv3VFU)!!!!


	2. you dont have to type, im literally standing right here

Vi has three months in the K-Lab before the first disaster hits. She doesn’t realize it’s a disaster at first. It looks like an ordinary day, albeit an ordinary day minus both Doctor Gottlieb and the Newt.

“Hello? Doctor Gottlieb?” Their relationship is still frosty, to say the least. But Vi does try. This morning, she gets nothing, not even the usual dismissive grunt.

What she does get, however, is a chat window from Dr. G1 the second she logs into her computer.

_hey have you seen hermann?_  
_are you in yet_  
_message me when you get this  
_ _please_

_He’s not in the lab,_ Vi types. _Why? Is something wrong?_

She gets a reply almost instantly.

_i dont know_  
_he went out last night with sum buddies and didnt come back_  
_and i cant contact him  
_ _this isnt like him_

Vi scowls at the text. Something doesn’t feel quite right, but she can’t quite put her finger on what it could be. _Why don’t you look for him?_

There’s a long pause. Vi sees the little ellipses bubble appear and disappear, over and over. Someone typing and re-typing their words. Finally:

_this might be easier if i show you_  
_turn around, try not to scream  
_ _i hate it when people scream_

It is, Vi thinks, one of the most terrifying things she’s ever seen typed. She obeys, heart suddenly hammering, unsure of what she’ll see.

Her first though is that the Newt can move quietly, when it wants to. It wasn’t there before but it sure is now, looming over her chair.

Vi’s second thought is that the Newt is holding a laptop; big hands grasped around the case, little hands typing on the keyboard. It hits enter. Behind her, Vi’s laptop chimes. When she turns, the message on the screen reads:

_hi_

When she looks back, the Newt waves.

Vi is very, very proud of the way her hands do not shake when she types:

_I don’t understand?_

The Newt’s mouth opens in its bright-toothed grin.

 _you dont have to type,_ it types. _im literally standing right here_

“I don’t under—” Vi gets halfway through repeating. Then stops. Stops, and feels her eyes go very wide.

The Newt’s grin, Doctor G1’s grin, gets even bigger. _there it is. now you’ve figured it out,_ it, he, types. _i told hermherm you would eventually_

“I thought they called you ‘the Newt’ because—” says Vi’s stupid mouth. She stops the end of the sentence with two hands, clapped across her face. It occurs to her she’s never actually heard anyone call the Newt “the Newt” in its presence.

_because i look a bit like a newt?  
_ _no, that’s coincidentally ironic, i can assure you_

“You’re Doctor Newton Geiszler!”

_wow_  
_maybe herms was right  
_ _youve gotta be a kaiju groupie if you can say that right first try ;)_

The Newt, Doctor Geiszler, winks along with the smilie. At least, half the eyes on its, his, face go dark, and Vi assumes that’s a wink.

“You!” Vi starts. “You invented the K-vaccine! You’re the reason I’m here! The reason I applied to K-Lab! I thought… I didn’t think…”

The official story, Vi knows, is that Newton Geiszler retired after the vaccine for the kaiju virus had been put into mass production. He’d been awarded a Nobel Prize for his efforts, though hadn’t shown up to claim it. The general assumption had been a kind of PTSD-induced reclusiveness, or wanderlust; Geiszler either locking himself up in a remote mansion or backpacking around the jungle, depending on who happened to be telling the story.

And maybe Vi is a groupie, just a little bit. Because she’s heard all the rumours about Doctor Geiszler’s fate. Including, as it turns out, the one that’s true.

_our benevolent overlords decided it would be ~bad ~pr to let on that the inventor of the k-vaccine saved everyone but himself_  
_so im officially and indefinitely awol_  
_but that?_  
_right now?_  
_not important_  
_important is hermann_  
_who is awol for reals  
_ _we need to find him_

Right. Doctor Gottlieb. Of course.

“Aren’t there… people on the base for this?” Vi says. She doesn’t seem like she doesn’t want to help, but…

But Doctor Geiszler makes a disgusted sort of growl, throwing up all four arms. He paces as he types:

_not anymore_  
_its too long to get into_  
_and you don’t want to be involved anyway_  
_just… trust me_  
_were on our own for this one_  
_klab is always on its own_  
_when it comes down to it_  
_people only give a shit when they can get something out of us  
_ _otherwise were just the freaks in the basement_

Frankenstein and the Newt, indeed. Frankenstein, the Newt, and Vi, who says, “Okay. What do you need me to do?”

* * *

Doctor Geiszler needs someone to use the phone, which Vi absolutely can do. So she spends the morning calling every hospital and police station in Hong Kong. It gives her Cantonese a work out, which doesn’t go unnoticed by Doctor Geiszler.

_your cv says you speak fluent cantonese_

Vi tries not to blush. “I do. Kinda. But we’re from Wagga Wagga. So we all have pretty terrible accents.” Fluent is maybe a stretch; Vi knows enough Cantonese to make small-talk with her great aunt about boys and school. But she’d _really_ wanted the K-Lab job. So maybe her CV had been padded. Just a little.

_where the hell is woggawogga?_

“Australia,” Vi says. Then, when this just earns her a _well, duh_ look from Doctor Geiszler: “Um. South-east New South Wales. Inland.” Very, very inland. The sort of very, very inland that got very, very popular when monsters started clawing their way out of the sea. Vi’s family had originally been from Sydney, had lived there since some great-great-something relative had opened an import-export business and made a fortune in the gold rush days. So much for all of that.

Vi gives Doctor Gottlieb’s description to at least two dozen people over the course of the morning, all in vain; neither the police nor the health care system have seen him. Doctor Geiszler is getting more and more frantic with each passing minute. Growling, pacing back and forth across the lab, tail thrashing, claws clicking against the floor, fingers thrashing out frantic staccato against the keyboard of his laptop. Vi has no idea who he’s talking to, but it doesn’t seem to reassure him.

Finally, she says, “That’s it. I’m not sure there’s anywhere else I can call. I’m sorry.”

Six bright blue eyes— Or maybe it’s eight, or four, Vi isn’t sure which dots are functional and which are decorative… but _some_ number of bright blue eyes regard her for a long time. Then:

_can you drive a van?_

“I… can try?” At least people in Hong Kong drive on the right side of the road. Which is to say, the left.

_good_  
_come with me  
_ _and bring your phone_

* * *

Walking through the Shatterdome with Doctor Geiszler is an… interesting experience, to say the least. Vi hasn’t really seen him move before, at least not out in the open. He does so on all fours, running with his big limbs even as he continues to text on his phone with his small ones.

“Do people… know who you are?” Vi asks, after they round a corner and startle a bunch of people into high-pitched shrieking. That’s the third group so far.

_not really_  
_i mean_  
_its not exactly a secret, but_  
_it kinda is?  
_ _idk most people don’t ask me so fuck em_

Awesome. So now Vi is officially the girl who was chasing a runaway kaiju through the Shatterdome. Not that Doctor Geiszler is even really running, Vi doesn’t think. But he’s big and he moves _fast_ —even while texting, which is totally unfair—and Vi doesn’t consider herself unfit, but she’s not the tallest girl in the world and, well. There’s only so much her legs can do.

Point being, she has to yell, “It’s all right! He’s all right!” a few times over her shoulder, when Doctor Geiszler barrels through one too many groups of on-edge pilots.

 _fucking jaeger assholes,_ is the official opinion on this subject. _just ignore them_

“Um…” says Vi.

_long story_  
_well tell you everything_  
_later_  
_hermann hasnt wanted to because_  
_well_  
_youll find out_  
_point being, pilots and kaiju?_  
_not friends_  
_and your in k-lab now  
_ _that makes you honorary kaiju with the rest of us freaks and monsters_

There’s a story there, Vi thinks. From the outside, the last she’d heard about K-Lab was that they’d figured out how to close the Breach, then developed the k-vaccine. She’s starting to get the impression that isn’t even close to the whole picture.

Doctor Geiszler has them run halfway across the ‘Dome, until they emerge into a large, underground loading bay. He points with one of his big claws.

_that’s the van  
_ _try not to be seen_

Vi blinks. “Wait,” she hisses. “Wait. Are we allowed—?” But Doctor Geiszler has already gone, leaping up a concrete pillar and crawling his way upside down across the ceiling. His bioluminescence has gone dark, and he’s a lot harder to see in the gloom than Vi would’ve expected from a twelve foot monster. Harder to see, and faster, and quieter, and, okay. Vi is starting to get an idea of why people may be uneasy in his presence.

She hurries after him, glad she wore flats so her heels don’t click against the concrete. There are people but they’re over the far side of the enormous space, loading and unloading vans. They aren’t paying attention to Vi, and hopefully it’ll stay that way.

When she gets to the van, the keys are on the driver’s seat and Doctor Geiszler is already curled up in the back. He barely fits, is just a big dark shadow of glowing eyes and the faint illumination from the screen of his phone.

“Where are we—?” is as far as Vi gets before her phone starts buzzing.

Doctor Geiszler sends her a map address, a bar somewhere in Kowloon.

 _last place I felt hermann,_ is the explanation.

“’Felt’?” The van is huge and clunky, like trying to pilot a Jaeger solo. Vi’s car back home was an old hand-me down Mini. She’s never driven anything bigger than her mother’s Golf.

_kaiju weirdness  
_ _ill explain later_

Vi manages to manoeuvre the van through pylons and up onto the exit ramp without crashing. Just. If Doctor Geiszler notices her terrible driving, he’s polite enough not to comment. Vi, meanwhile, is thinking about Doctor Gottlieb. Who’s spent the last three months ignoring Vi and talking to the Newt, instead, and Vi had just thought he was eccentric, except:

“The hive mind,” she exclaims. “You’re talking about the kaiju hive mind. You can talk to Doctor Gottlieb telepathically!” She didn’t think it worked on humans, not without a Pons and a lot of trauma.

_could do_  
_until this morning  
_ _hence: concern_

“But what does that mean? He’s unconscious? Off the island?” _Dead_ , she doesn’t add, though she’s sure Doctor Geiszler has thought it.

_dont know_  
_tryin not to think about it tbh_  
_not unconscious tho, that shouldn’t block it_  
_not distance, either  
_ _at best, someones removed the implant_

“How… how difficult would that be?” She’s never heard of an implant that enables telepathy before. Like some kind of constant, portable Pons? Are the doctors constantly in Drift? Surely not.

_its attached to his brain  
_ _so not easy_

And Doctor Geiszler had offered that as a best-case scenario. Vi can hear him in the back, making a low, anxious chirring sound, one that isn’t quite drowned out by the van’s engine.

Vi just puts her foot down, and drives faster.

* * *

The bar is not the sort of place Vi could possibly imagine Doctor Gottlieb ever voluntarily walking into. It’s also the sort of place that’s still open at ten in the morning, mostly because it looks like the sort of place that never closes.

Vi finds the bartender and slips him a wad of cash. She’s still unused to both tipping and the Hong Kong Dollar, so she’s got no idea whether the amount is appropriate, but the guy vanishes it underneath the counter before Vi can blink.

“Anorak guy,” says the bartender. “Yeah, I remember him. Tourist. Who the hell wears a fur hood in Hong Kong?”

Doctor Gottlieb does, that’s who. Vi has no idea how he stands it.

“Was here, totally wasted. Kept talking about this… this maths shit. His buddies dragged him out maybe three, four a.m.?”

“Did… did they say where they were going?”

The earns her a narrow-eyed stare, appraising. Eventually, the bartender says, “Guy came in about an hour ago. Said people might come asking the questions you’re asking now.”

Vi swallows, suddenly very aware she’s just a biology graduate. Not… whatever a person would need to be to deal with something like this. “Um,” she says. “Did they?”

“Yeah,” says the bartender. “Paid me a lot of money to give whoever did this note.” He produces a piece of paper from under the counter.

Vi takes it. “Um. Thank you.”

“Girl,” the bartender says, “I see a lot in this job. You get a feel for people, you know? Who’s gonna make trouble, who just was to have fun, who wants to forget. You hear me?”

“Um. I guess?”

“Guy who gave me that note? If you’re gonna go toe-to-toe with someone like that? No offence, but I hope you brought backup.”

Vi looks the bartender straight in the eye and says, completely deadpan, “I have a pissed-off kaiju in the back of my van.”

The bartender snorts. “Good. You’re gonna need it.”

* * *

The note’s in code, just a long string of letters.

 _it looks like a chemical formula,_ Doctor Geiszler says, when Vi hands it over.

“I know, but it’s not. The atomic numbers of the elements correspond to letters of the alphabet.” At Doctor Geiszler’s look, Vi feels her cheeks start to heat up. “We used to pass notes like this in high school.”

_cute_  
_and clever  
_ _i told hermherm you were a good choice_

The praise doesn’t help the blushing, so Vi stutters, “I think someone is trying to write a message for a scientist to decode.” She pauses. “Um. For you to decode.”

 _WE HAVE UR BOYFREND,_ the note says, typos and all. _TERMS OF RELESE CAN B NEGOTIATED_. Then an address, and, _CUM ALONE._

 _im not sure if the last line is terrible spelling, a shitty joke, or some kind of threat,_ is Doctor Geiszler’s response. Vi tries not to think of the time she saw him with his giant glowing tongue down Doctor Gottlieb’s throat.

_its okay_  
_you can ask  
_ _i know what they say_

“I—!” Vi squeaks. “I don’t—! I mean! It’s none of my business! Um. What you do.”

_not a lot of people see it that way_

“My dad really liked old videogames,” Vi says in explanation. “When I was growing up. We used to play them together. You know, um. There’s this one, _Mass Effect_? It’s about, like, um—” Aliens and the end of the world, but Doctor Geiszler is nodding, so, “I always used to make him romance Garrus.” And yeah, wow. Not helping the blushing. Not at all.

Doctor Geiszler makes a strange barking sound Vi realises is laughter. _not a very popular opinion nowadays,_ he texts. _xenophilia_

Vi just shrugs, resisting the urge to hide her face in her hands. “We’ve had one bad experience with one group of aliens from one planet,” she says. “The Yanks nuked the Japanese last century, and now they build giant robots together. I don’t know why things have to be different, just because everything is bigger.”

A pause, then:

_you know the original kaiju films were a cultural backlash against the horrors of atomic fallout?  
_ _they were a way for a country to come to terms with wholesale nuclear slaughter_

Vi nods, because she does know this. The irony isn’t lost on her this time, either. So she gives Doctor Geiszler a half-grin. “Don’t tell anyone,” she says, “but I was a teenage weeaboo too.”

This earns her another barking laugh.

_your secret is safe with me_  
_now  
_ _wanna go on a rescue mission?_

* * *

It’s a terrible idea from the start, and maybe if things had been different, Vi would’ve realised it. As it is, hopped up on adrenalin, on being within arm’s reach of a real life kaiju (or kaijin?), of meeting Doctor Newton Geiszler, of Doctor Newton Geiszler thinking she, Vivian Lee, is kind of okay… As it is, maybe Vi isn’t thinking, not really. And maybe she realises this, the second she walks into a the empty warehouse, empty except for one Doctor Hermann Gottlieb, head half-shaved and bleeding, taped to a chair, who takes one look at her and says:

“For godssakes it’s a _trap_ you absolute _imbecile_!”

Things get sort of chaotic, after that. Vi remembers fragments, like Doctor Geiszler, leaping from the back of the van, claws out and roaring. She remembers thinking that even a tiny angry kaiju is still an angry kaiju, and maybe the people who’ve suddenly appeared from the roof realise that when they get a face-full of glowing fangs.

She remembers pain, across the back of her skull. Remembers hitting the cold, dirty concrete. Remembers a strange, loud staccato she thinks at the time is someone banging a dumpster lid, and will later realise was gunfire. Most of all, she remembers Doctor Gottlieb, screaming as he watches men dressed in black pin Doctor Geiszler to the floor with harpoons, like some kind of enormous, roaring butterfly.

After that, mostly what she remembers is darkness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey you! [Don't you know who I am?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1_NtckgpXU)


	3. "Newton is an imbecile with all the common sense of a hive-severed kaiju spawn."

“You’re in a lot of trouble, Ms. Lee. I’m not sure if you appreciate how much yet. But you will.”

This time, when Vi opens her eyes, she’s the one tied to a chair.

Her head aches and the room is nothing but blinding brightness. Vi whimpers, tries to thrash. The chair she’s handcuffed to doesn’t so much as shift.

“It’s bolted to the floor,” says the voice. It’s male, deep. American. Coming from across a table in front of her. Vi can’t make out any details against the light, angled in her face.

“W-who are you?” she says. Her voice quavers, inches from tears. “Where’s Doctor Ge— Doctor Gottlieb.” Whoever these people are, she doesn’t know if they know about Doctor Geiszler. She’s absolutely sure that, if they don’t, she shouldn’t tell them.

“Who are you working for, Ms. Lee?” says the voice, ignoring her question.

“What?”

“Don’t make me repeat myself, girl. You wouldn’t like me when I repeat myself.”

Vi’s heart is pounding a mile a minute, her hands sweating so much she wonders if she’ll be able to slip them out of the handcuffs. “I don’t have to tell you anything!” she says. “Not until you tell me who you are, and what you’ve done with Doctor Gottlieb!” She tells herself that, wherever she is, whatever happens, what these monsters are doing to Doctor Gottlieb will be worse.

She doesn’t even want to think about what they’ll do to Doctor Geiszler.

The figure in front of her sighs, big and dramatic. Reaches into a jacket pocket, pulls something out. There’s a sharp, metallic snap, then a brief burst of flame. A moment later, Vi gets a mouthful of acrid, reeking cigar smoke, blown into her face.

She coughs, retches. Wonders if she can make herself throw up all over her captor. Maybe a pointless defiance, in the long run. But it’ll make her feel better.

“Last chance: who are you working for?” The red burning ring of the cigar end starts to get closer, close enough that Vi can see it even through the blinding brightness.

“Fuck you, asshole!” There’s a hot, hard ball of rage sitting somewhere deep below Vi’s gut. She grabs onto it. It’s better than the cold, sweaty slick of fear. “I’m not telling you fucking anything! Whatever you’ve done to the doctors, the Corps will come looking for them eventually! You won’t get away with this!” Spit goes flying out of her mouth, lands on the end of the cigar with a wet hiss.

The figure in front of her laughs. He leans back, takes another drag of the cigar Vi can only see in silhouette. Then he says:

“You know, you might actually have to entertain the possibility you’re wrong about the girl.” He isn’t taking to Vi when he says it. “We could do this all day, but if you ask me, I think she’s telling the truth.” A pause, then: “Newt obviously trusts her.” And Vi feels like someone’s kicked all the air out of her lungs. Doubly so when a familiar voice says:

“I think it’s been proven multiple times by now that Newton is an imbecile with all the common sense of a hive-severed kaiju spawn. If he weren’t, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.”

Vi sits bolt upright, tries to look behind her. “Doctor Gottlieb? Doctor Gottlieb, are you okay? What’s going on? Where— where’s Doctor Geiszler?” She looks back to the silhouette, unsure, but… But he mentioned Newt, right?

“Still think she’s a mole, Hermann?” The silhouette man stands, vanishes into the glare for a moment. There’s a sharp snap, and the lighting in the room changes, the brightness vanishing, replaced by a more even, dull glow.

As Vi’s eyes adjust, she gets a good look at the stranger. He’s older, white, wearing a tastelessly opulent three-piece suit and a weird pair of sunglasses that look almost like goggles. He’s also huge, in all dimensions, and vaguely familiar in a way Vi can’t place.

“You’ll have to excuse the less than friendly reception,” he tells her. He has a nice voice, the sort of thing people describe with chocolate-words like “rich” and “dark” and “smooth”. “Hermann here is convinced you’re a spy, out to destroy K-Lab.”

“Doctor Gottlieb!” Vi struggles to turn. “I would never!”

“That would make you very unique indeed,” comes the voice from somewhere Vi can’t quite see.

“I’ve wanted to work in K-Lab since I was in high school!” Vi says. “Then, when the k-virus emerged… My brother was…” She swallows, heavy and hard against the memory. “The Corps released the vaccine two days later. I told myself, if I’d been there, if there’d been just one more person, maybe…” Maybe Michael would still be alive. Maybe he wouldn’t have died the way he had, flesh rotting off his bones, organs swelling big enough to burst. The k-virus is an awful thing. Surely Doctor Gottlieb, of all people, would know that.

“Sad backstory, Hermann,” says weird glasses man. “How can you say no to a girl with a sad backstory?” Then: “Scuse me,” as he reaches down to unlock Vi’s handcuffs.

As soon as she can, Vi stands. Doctor Gottlieb is sitting in a chair on the far side of the room, arms outstretched and resting on his cane. He looks tired, and bruised, and now his whole head has been shaved. Vi has the out-of-place thought that he’s actually quite handsome—albeit severe—when he’s not trying hard not to be.

“Please,” she says. “Doctor Gottlieb. Just… Where’s Doctor Geiszler? Is he okay?”

Doctor Gottlieb’s lips thin, and he looks away. His hand lifts to touch a spot at the base of his neck; there’s a big bandage stuck to the skin there, blood soaking through the white. “So you worked it out then?” he asks. “About Newton?”

“He told me,” Vi confesses.

“I… see.”

He doesn’t sound happy, and Vi feels the need to defend Doctor Geiszler’s decisions. “Only because he was worried about _you_!” she says. “He wanted someone to call the hospitals. He couldn’t feel you and he thought you’d died!”

Vi must sound sufficiently earnest, because Doctor Gottlieb’s expression does soften, just a fraction. He sighs, his hand once again reaching up to touch the base of his neck. “They found a way to kill the symbiote,” he says. “I was very drunk at the time, but the experience was still… unpleasant. Like losing a limb.”

“Like having half your brain gouged out,” says Glasses Guy.

“Quite.”

Doctor Geiszler had called it an implant, Doctor Gottlieb a symbiote. The difference, the implication of the difference, isn’t lost on Vi.

“Are… are you going to tell me what’s going on?” she says. “Where’s Doctor Geiszler?”

“We don’t know,” says Doctor Gottlieb.

“Hermann was hoping you could tell us,” says Glasses Guy. “Since you’re a spy, and all.”

“Yes, thank you, Chau. I was wrong. I admit it. Happy? Move on.”

“I’m really am just a biology graduate,” Vi says. “But… whatever I can do, I want to help.” That’s why she’d joined K-Lab in the first place. Admittedly, this wasn’t exactly her idea of a normal day at work, but she’s still on probation for another few months, so figures she shouldn’t complain.

“My people are on it,” says Glasses Guy Chau. “If someone’s in the market, they’ll come through me eventually.”

Doctor Gottlieb’s fingers tighten around the head of his cane. “And if they’re not ‘in the market’?”

“They have Newt,” Chau says. “What else would they be doing?”

Realization dawns on Vi. “They were never after you,” she says to Doctor Gottlieb. “They were using you to lure Doctor Geiszler. Why?”

“It’s cute,” Chau says, grinning. “How she always calls him ‘doctor’.”

“Newton seems to think you’re clever,” Doctor Gottlieb says, ignoring Chau. “So you tell me. What _are_ the kaiju?”

“They’re weapons,” Vi says, because everyone knows that one by now. “Biological weapons, and—” She stops, feels the horror slowly creep up her spine.

“The dai-kaiju of the War required the Breach to enter our world,” Doctor Gottlieb says. “When we closed it, we cut off their doorway. I’ve no doubt the beings who sent them could tear another one, just as I’ve no doubt they’re now very well aware we could close it in the same manner. Our technology is crude, but a bomb is a bomb.” He sighs.

“What you don’t know, what the Corps doesn’t tell the public, is that the Kaiju War didn’t end with the closing of the Breach. It merely… changed. Where once we had a single Breach to deal with, now we have a thousand. Microscopic things, leeching poison into world.”

“The k-virus,” Vi guesses.

“Indeed. It’s difficult, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate, for us to send a thermonuclear device through a hole smaller than the width of a hair. But it’s certainly large enough to deliver a pathogen. The creatures we’re fighting no longer need to send fully-formed weapons to our planet. Not when they’re engineering a way to turn us into weapons against ourselves.”

“But… but the k-virus isn’t stable,” Vi says. “It kills everything it mutates.” Not always quickly, but eventually.

“For now, yes,” Doctor Gottlieb says. “I believe our opponents, for once, are less familiar with our biology than we are with theirs. It was that familiarity that allowed Newton to develop the k-vaccine in the first place. And what continues to allow him to update it against new strains.”

Vi feels every single hair on her body stand on end. “I… I didn’t realize—”

“That the virus is still mutating? Yes. We used to find a new strain every six months, then three, now we’re down to one. Only small changes, enough for us to develop new countermeasures. But we believe we’re being tested; for every life we save, we provide the information our opponents require to develop something worse. In six months, twelve, we should see the results of that.”

“The first Earth-born kaiju,” Chau says.

Vi thinks of all the new Jaeger pilots she’s seen roaming the Shatterdome. She had wondered, with the Breach closed, why the Corps had suddenly seemed to go on a recruiting drive. Now, she wishes she didn’t know the answer.

Except:

“Second. Second Earth-born kaiju. Doctor Geiszler is the first, isn’t he?”

Doctor Gottlieb nods, thin-lipped and tight. “By his own stupidity, no less. A side-effect of his work on the k-vaccine. Newton knows how to create stable kaiju and has done so for years.”

“Just Doctor Geiszler?”

“Yes. Quite simply, we lied to the Corps. Told them Newton’s stabilization was an accident, un-replicable. As you can perhaps imagine, there are… factions that refuse to accept this as an appropriate answer.”

“Who… who knows this?” Vi is starting to wish she didn’t. It feels like the sort of thing she shouldn’t know.

“The people in this room,” Doctor Gottlieb says. “A handful of others. We have few friends in the Corps and the number is shrinking. And there are many, many powerful people in this world who would quite happily kill, and worse, to command their own kaiju armies. So you’ll have to excuse my reluctance when you first appeared on our doorstep.”

Vi feels sick. “I… I’d never…”

“Newton trusts you,” Doctor Gottlieb repeats Chau’s words from earlier. “In many things, the man is an imbecile but…” He sighs. “In this, he has more to lose than most. So perhaps I should trust his judgement. Just this once.”

“Don’t worry,” Chau says. “I won’t tell him you said so.”

“There’s something you’re not telling _me_ ,” Vi says, slow and scowling. “About the stabilization.” She can feel the pieces, trying to line themselves up behind her eyes. “The k-virus is supposed to be a weapon. Against humanity. But Doctor Geiszler is… just Doctor Geiszler. He looks like a mini-kaiju, but—”

“He has the mind of a man,” Doctor Gottlieb finishes. “Correct. And thus, you find the missing piece.”

“It has to do with you, doesn’t it? With the… the link you have. Had.”

“We nearly shot him,” Doctor Gottlieb says. “After he first… turned. He can’t speak, you’ve discovered this, and when he lost the ability to write as well…” Doctor Gottlieb closes his eyes, turns his head like the memory pains him. “He grew… more aggressive. He’s still linked to the kaiju hive mind, you understand, and although the connection is weak, it overwhelmed him. There was… a decision. That he be terminated. I think there was enough left in him to understand what was going to happen. He was so afraid, so _angry_ , I…” Doctor Gottlieb stops, takes a shaky breath.

Chau picks up the story:

“We orchestrated an accident. They were transporting him to the kill-site. We intercepted. The idea was to catch him, keep him contained.”

“Keep him comfortable,” Doctor Gottlieb says. “If nothing else, I could give him that. He didn’t deserve… after everything he’d done for the Corps, for humanity…”

“The short of it,” Chau says, “is we fucked up. He got out, went straight for Hermann. Knocked him to the ground and shoved some kind of fucking tentacle right up his fucking nose. I seen a lot of weird shit in my day. That’s not the weirdest. But it’s up there.”

“There’s a lot we don’t fully understand about kaiju biology,” Doctor Gottlieb adds, voice stronger. “The symbiote is one such thing. It’s not a Drift, it’s not the hive mind, but it’s similar to both. I don’t know what instinct drove Newton to do what he did, but the action… anchored him. Once the symbiote attached—”

“He makes it sound so simple,” Chau says. “There was a _lot_ of screaming.”

“Yes, it hurt,” Doctor Gottlieb snaps. “But that’s hardly the point. Once it was attached… As I said, it’s not a Drift. But the initial stages are similar. And Newton… he was still _there_. Fractured, but with the link, he was able to come back, piece by piece. By the time the Corps found us, he was… himself. More or less. Needless to say, the resulting bureaucracy was a nightmare, but we’re not entirely without friends in the organization. And, whether they liked it or not, they still needed Newton for the vaccine. So we did a deal.”

“With the devil, if you ask me,” mutters Chau. He sounds like a man who has not, in fact, been asked, and has not been asked many times.

“If you’ve spoken to him,” Doctor Gottlieb continues, “you may have noticed Newton harbors a certain… disaffection with the Corps.”

Vi tries a grin, though it feels stiff and awful on her face. “Just a little.”

“Now you know why.”

It makes sense. Vi isn’t sure she could return to an organization that had ordered her death, no matter how much fate of the world was on the line.

There’s another problem:

“How much time do we have?” she says. “To get him back? Before…” Before he isn’t himself any more.

Doctor Gottlieb sighs. “I don’t know. After the first incident, Newton started taking… countermeasures. Against the hive mind. But they aren’t permanent. He’s on a clock, I… I just don’t have enough data to know if that clock is measured in months or in days.”

“Either way,” Chau says, “you’re assuming you can even take another grub-shot up the nose.”

“I’ll just have to, won’t I?”

“Docs tell me there’s a lotta dead grey back there. Whoever pulled the last grub out, I don’t think they intended you to live much past the ‘surgery’.”

“I heal fast,” Doctor Gottlieb says. An innocuous comment, delivered oddly stiffly, his eyes flicking to Vi and away again.

Chau chuckles. “Amount of Pure Blue Newt pumps you with, I’m not surprised.”

Doctor Gottlieb goes absolutely scarlet. “Yes,” he says. “Thank you, Hannibal, for your eternally valuable ability to make the implicit explicit.”

Doctor Gottlieb goes absolutely scarlet, and Vi feels herself swiftly following. They _can’t_ be talking about—

“Literally explicit, in this case,” Chau adds.

Oh god, they _totally_ are. They are totally talking about the regenerative properties of kaiju cum, and—

“Oh. My. _God_. _That’s_ what that stuff is?”

End of all disease, Geiszler had said. Immortality, he’d promised. Just a cell sample, he’d told her, not important where it’s from. Asshole. Next time Vi sees him, she’s totally going to kick him right in the cell samples. As soon as she can work out where he keeps them.

“Oh, great.” Now Chau is pissed off. “He’ll give it to the girl, but not to me? I’m hurt, Hermann. Truly hurt. I thought we were friends. We could be rich, you know how much people will pay for shit like that? I’d do a fair split, I—”

“I am not discussing this!” Doctor Gottlieb snaps, lurching upright. “No. Absolutely not. Not today, not any day. No. Newton is god knows where, experiencing god knows what, _alone_. I am not discussing with you how… how best to _sell_ him. I…” He cuts himself off, lets out a long string of words Vi doesn’t catch and thinks must be in German. Then the Doctor slams his cane down hard against the floor, twice, and strides out of the room. The boom from the door’s closing echoes in his wake.

There’s silence for a while, then: “I don’t speak German, but he sounded pretty mad.”

Chau sighs. “Called me a vulture, amongst less respectable things,” he says. “Do you think it was too much?”

“I think he’s worried about Doctor Geiszler.”

“They’ve been lovers for years,” Chau says. “They don’t always get on, but they always come as a two-for-one. Funny thing is, you know Hermann is married? Not to Newt, I mean.”

“Really?” And, okay. Maybe it’s gossip, but Vi can’t help be interested.

“She’s a model, if you can believe it. Smoking hot. Met her once or twice, lovely lady. Very fond of Newt. Taught herself HKSL so they could gossip about Hermann behind his back.”

“Does she, um…?”

Chau just shrugs. “Encourages it. Whatever makes people happy, who’m I to judge?”

“You’re Hannibal Chau,” Vi says, because she’s figured out why the guy looks so familiar. “You’re the kaiju parts dealer.”

“ _Infamous_ kaiju parts dealer, please.” But Chau is grinning.

“That’s what you meant, about being able to find Doctor Geiszler ‘if someone’s in the market’.”

“Newt’s a pacifist by politics,” Chau says, “but he’s still kaiju. He can make a mess when he wants to. It’s the sort of mess it takes some very specific equipment to contain. Now Hermann? Hermann’s a doing guy. He’s used to doing in a lab with a whiteboard, but that’s still how doing works when you’re Hermann Gottlieb. When you’re Hannibal Chau, you have other people to do the doing for you. You understand me?”

Vi nods. She gets it. They aren’t doing nothing, even if it feels like they are. Chau’s people are looking, in all the sorts of places only Chau’s people know to look.

“What do you see,” Chau asks, “when you look at them? Newt and Hermann.” His voice is slow, drawling. Almost hypnotic. Like black velvet over diamond-sharpened knives.

“Um,” says Vi. “I guess… I see two people trying to do their best to make the world a better place?”

“And that’s why you wanted to join K-Lab? Wanna make the world a better place?”

“Yeah.” Vi tries not to blush. It’s not a blush-worthy dream, she doesn’t think.

“The Corps has a proper research division, you know. The EBERL. Runs out of California. Two point three billion in funding last year alone.”

“I know,” says Vi, because she does. The Extra-Biological Entity Research Laboratory, acronym pronounced as a single word. In theory, it’s the successor to K-Lab because, in theory, K-Lab is being decommissioned. Near as Vi can tell, K-Lab has been “being decommissioned” since the War ended.

“I didn’t want to work in EBERL,” she says. “I wanted to work in K-Lab.” Down in the basement with the freaks and monsters. Two point three billion funneled into California, and Doctor Gottlieb complains because he has to buy whiteboard markers out of his own pocket. Vi is almost certain they keep going missing because Doctor Geiszler eats them. She’s not sure if they’re even food to him or he just likes messing with Doctor Gottlieb. Maybe both.

“You know what I see?” Chau is saying. “When I look at Newt and Hermann, I see the future of the Jaeger program. Right now, we scramble kids’ brains and bolt them into trillion-dollar tin cans. The entire world economy gets funneled into keeping those monstrosities from falling apart, but you know what don’t fall apart? Kaiju don’t fall apart. They don’t need maintenance crews, they self-heal, they barely even need fuel, at least in the way we understand it. Shove one of their parasites in a kid’s brain, then hand her a baby monster. Tell her it’s hers and she has to give it a name, to look after it. Help it get big and strong, ‘cause when it’s big and strong, it’ll defend the Earth from evil. There was this thing, back before the war. A video game, about—”

“ _Pokémon_ ,” Vi says. “You mean _Pokémon_ , right? I used to play it with my dad.”

“’Gotta catch ‘em all’,” quotes Chau. “Good to see kids still appreciate the classics. It was the biggest, but it wasn’t the only one. The idea of controlling your own monster, of being its friend, its bonded confidant, used to be a popular one. Now, it’s both borderline sedition and an almost-realized scientific truth.”

“It… would be pretty cool,” Vi admits.

“Even at the cost of taking an alien parasite to the brain?”

Vi shrugs. Chau is talking about transhumanism, and transhumanism has never frightened her. She wrote an essay about it in high school. One that had landed her a free trip to the councillor’s office.

Here, today, Chau just laughs. “Welcome to K-Lab, kid,” he says. “Sounds like you’ll fit right in.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, no lie: I'm kinda a bit of a Ron Perlman fan. So, yanno. [I regret nothing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrG4TEcSuRg).


	4. “You wanted to join K-Lab. Well. Welcome to it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whhhhyyyyy did I write this fic in this POV? Whhhhhyyyyyy? D:
> 
> Also: For anyone who's interested, [it's the Newt](http://orphan-dat.tumblr.com/post/135903760560/quick-doodle-of-kaijunewton-kaijinnewt-from).

Half a day passes, and still Chau’s people haven’t dug up a lead. They spend the time in his… house? Place of business? Shady smugglers’ den? Vi isn’t sure of what it is, exactly, only that it’s filled with red silk and gold velvet, kaiju parts preserved in jars, and a kind of Western faux-Orientalism Vi finds vaguely offensive.

Doctor Gottlieb does not like the waiting. He spends most of his time sitting on an enormous, over-opulent couch, leg jiggling and eyes closed. Chau brings him baijiu, which he drinks too fast, then some more, which he doesn’t. His leg slows down a little with the jiggling the more he drinks, but not by much.

“I’m sorry about Doctor Geiszler,” Vi says to him, because she feels she should. “If I’d stopped him—”

Doctor Gottlieb doesn’t open his eyes, but he does wave a hand, dismissive. “Don’t start taking credit for Newton’s idiocy,” he says. “You’ll never find the end of it. Trust me, I’ve been in the man’s head, and his capacity for foolishness is as vast as the universe is empty.” Doctor Gottlieb, Vi remembers, is primarily a doctor of physics.

She says: “You’ve Drifted with Doctor Geiszler? Proper Drifted, I mean.” Ouch. She didn’t mean that to sound as… dismissive as it does. The man still has a hole in the back of his brain, the least she could do is try and be a little sensitive.

“Mm,” says Doctor Gottlieb.

“What’s it like?”

“Unpleasant. Given we were Drifting with the kaiju hive mind at the the time—this was back in the War, when Newton was human—I suspect our results were not typical, as they say.”

“Wait. You Drifted with the hive mind? For reals?”

Doctor Gottlieb does open his eyes at that, regarding Vi with piercing interest. “I keep losing track of what they put in the press releases and what they don’t,” he says. “Yes. We did. Newton’s idiot idea, of course. I don’t recommend it.” His head falls back again.

“How did you even manage it?” Vi asks. “How did you get a kaiju to sit still long enough to put it in a Pons?”

This earns her a bark of laughter. “Obviously, we didn’t. Newton realized kaiju tissue—” He stops, eyes flying open, posture rigid.

“Doctor Gottlieb?”

“Mein Gott!” says Doctor Gottlieb. At least, Vi is pretty certain that’s what he says. “Of course!” And then he’s lurching upright. Too fast, either for his leg or his alcohol consumption, and he stumbles.

“Doctor Gottlieb!” Vi jumps to her feet as well, attempting to catch him. But he’s already righted himself, is moving towards the room’s exit. He’s shouting something in German, repeating a word over and over that sounds a hell of a lot like “gear”.

Whatever the gear-word is, it rouses Hannibal Chau from the depths of his possibly-opium-den. Apparently he also speaks German, and he and Doctor Gottlieb have a long and animated shouting match in the middle of a corridor. Vi catches none of it—bar a few variations on the word “Scheiße”—and makes a mental note to perhaps consider taking a class in beginner’s German, along with the class in Hong Kong Sign Language she was already getting ready for.

“Doctor Gottlieb, what—?” is as far as Vi gets, once the man in question beings to run off down a red-draped corridor. Honestly, Vi wasn’t even sure he _could_ run but, no. Apparently the good doctor can, indeed, put on a burst of speed when he wants to.

He can also turn, lunge back towards Vi, and grab onto her arm. “Come!” he says. “Come, girl!” His accent gets thicker when he’s excited, Vi notes. And right now? Right now, Doctor Gottlieb is _very_ excited.

He drags Vi down the length of a corridor, into what looks like a dead end until Doctor Gottlieb pulls aside a silk curtain to reveal a door and an electronic keypad. It’s a tremendously _closed_ looking door, at least until Doctor Gottlieb taps out a too-long sequence on the keypad.

“The code is always the last known k-virus mutation,” Doctor Gottlieb says. “Remember that.”

“Uh-huh,” is all Vi manages to get out, before she’s being pulled through the opening.

Through the door, the light gets brighter. The light gets brighter, the air trading joss-smoke for the sharp, chemical acridity of a lab.

They’re in the airlock to a clean room.

There are the usual things; coveralls and hairnets and plastic goggles. Doctor Gottlieb tosses her a set, even as he’s dressing himself.

“Doctor Gottlieb?” Vi tries. “Where are we? What’s going on?”

Doctor Gottlieb makes a noise in the back of his throat. “You wanted to join K-Lab,” he says. “Well. Welcome to it.”

And then he opens the inner airlock door.

* * *

Chau’s building isn’t a house.

It isn’t a house, it isn’t a place of business, and it isn’t a shady smugglers’ den.

What it is, is a lab.

“Holy. Shit.”

“Ms. Lee,” Doctor Gottlieb says. “Welcome to K-Lab. K2, to be precise.”

The place is _huge_. Just a massive white-and-chrome space, easily the size of a warehouse, and dozens of people look up when Doctor Gottlieb enters.

They look up, and they stop, and they bow.

“Doctor Gottlieb,” says the nearest person; a woman, hidden behind her safety gear. “I’m sorry to hear about Doctor Geiszler.”

“I needs the Pons rig,” Doctor Gottlieb says. “And the biowaste from Newton’s last amputation. More, if you have it.”

“Yessir,” says the woman. Another bow, then she’s gone.

“Doctor Gottlieb?” Vi tries. “Doctor Gottlieb, what—?”

“Blame Newton,” Doctor Gottlieb says, on the move through row upon row of scientists and machines and tests. “As usual. He was… concerned. About the militarization of the Corps.”

“It’s… The PPDC _is_ a military organization!” Vi says.

“Yes,” says Doctor Gottlieb. “Against an external, existential threat. When the nature of that threat changed… when Newton’s understanding of that threat changed, so did his priorities. _Our_ priorities.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The Corps is compromised. Split down the center between those who wish to defend Earth and those whose lust for war and power knows no limit. The alliance formed by the Corps holds. For now. But invisible viruses aren’t enough, and every passing month in which no tangible threat emerges, that alliance grows ever more tenuous. There’s an old expression, Ms. Lee: ‘We’ve always been at war with Eastasia’. Understand this, and you’ll understand our current predicament.”

Vi has no idea what “war with east Asia” is supposed to refer to, but makes a mental note to Google the phrase, as soon as things calm down.

Meanwhile, she’s still coming to terms with the fact that K-Lab apparently has a whole other, well, lab. One operating outside the Shatterdome. One with _staff_. And funding, judging by the equipment she rushes past.

“Where—?” she starts.

“Chau’s work is lucrative,” Doctor Gottlieb says. “Newton is, in Hannibal’s charming words, a ‘license to print money’. We have a deal. This is what we get in return.”

Vi thinks of Doctor Geiszler, blood draining into a canister. She wonders how much that would be worth, to someone like Hannibal Chau. How many lab techs it could buy. Kaiju heal fast. That’s a lot of Kaiju Blue, Vi thinks. Voluntarily given, so no real expense on the collection side. Meaning almost pure profit from the sale. Pure profit, except for whatever R&D reinvestment Doctor Geiszler negotiated in exchange for his cooperation.

The lab has phone reception. One Google search later, and Vi knows it’s not “gear” she was hearing before. It was “geier”; the German word for vulture.

Doctor Gottlieb takes her to a room, cordoned off from the rest of the lab. There are a bunch of people here, clustered around a machine that looks assembled from the remains of a bombed-out Dick Smith. They do the bowing thing when they see the Doctor.

“Do you have it?” Doctor Gottlieb snaps.

“Yes, sir,” says a woman. Vi is pretty sure it’s the same woman from the entrance. “The last four samples from Doctor Geiszler. We’ve taken the liberty of decanting them into the same container.”

“Good,” says Doctor Gottlieb. “Good. Hook it up.”

“Doctor Gottlieb,” the woman says. “I don’t… If you’re intending to use the Pons solo, I’m obligated to advise against it.”

“I’m not solo,” Doctor Gottlieb says. “You’ve made sure of that, when you kept the tissue removed from Newton.”

“Doctor Gottlieb!” the lab woman says. She shoots a look to Vi, who just shrugs, helpless, in response. She has no idea what’s going on. She can hazard a guess, but she doesn’t _know_. And based on her guess, she’s just as freaked out as the lab lady is.

“Hook it up,” Doctor Gottlieb says. “Your objection is noted. Now. No more arguments.”

Vi has never seen a real Pons before. Even with its garage-assembled mad science aesthetic—or maybe because of it—this one sends a shiver running up her spine. To say that the operation of the Pons, of the Drift, isn’t well understood would be an understatement. It works, but it works in a way that’s abstruse enough to be functionally close to magic.

The Pons is obviously designed for two, Doctor Gottlieb hooked up to one side. The other is attached to a jar. Vi peers inside, past the preserving fluid. There are tissue samples in there. Smooth grey folded with neat arabesques. Pieces of a kaiju brain, and Vi’s never seen those in real life before either. Today certainly is turning out to be a day of firsts.

“Newton’s precaution against the hive mind,” Doctor Gottlieb says, gesturing to the jar. “The link is largely focused in one area of the secondary brain, a lobe not present in humans. He has his amputated. Just in case.”

“There’s more than one specimen in here,” Vi points out.

“Kaiju heal,” is the explanation. Vi tries not to feel ill.

It takes the better part of twenty minutes to get the Pons online, Doctor Gottlieb growing progressively more and more agitated by the delay. Vi gets the impression the lab techs are being overly cautious, and she understands the sentiment; she wouldn’t want to be responsible for giving irreparable brain damage to one of the world’s leading scientists, either.

Still. She volunteers to help, and is promptly put to work monitoring a screen that flashes and beeps. “If it goes red, scream,” is the instruction from the lab lead, Doctor Ng.

And then:

“Everything is set, Doctor Gottlieb,” says Doctor Ng. “We’ll start on your command.”

Vi sees Doctor Gottlieb’s fingers curl tighter around the armrests of his chair. He closes his eyes, breathes out in one long exhale, mutters something to himself in German. Then:

“Do it.”

Five seconds later, Vi is screaming.

* * *

“Hannibal! Hannibal, I found him! He’s on a ship!”

“Doctor!”

Doctor Gottlieb, trailing wires and his own blood, lurching out of the lab, followed by every single scientist in the place, Vi included.

“Doctor, please! You need to sit down!”

But Doctor Gottlieb isn’t listening to Doctor Ng, or to Vi, and he doesn’t listen to Chau either, when they finally find the man. Chau is in some kind of office, alternating his scowling between a tablet and a terrified subordinate.

“You look like shit,” he says, when Doctor Gottlieb bursts into the room.

“I know where he is.”

“You look like shit and you sound like Newt,” Chau amends. “Sit down before you rupture something. Else.” Doctor Gottlieb does not look like the sort of man in the mood to take this advice, so Chau enforces it by manhandling the Doctor into a chair.

“They’re on a boat. I think they’re still in the harbor, I can smell the diesel fumes and the swell isn’t right to be out on the ocean.” Doctor Gottlieb’s knee keeps jiggling and his accept keeps changing, blood running from both nostrils and pooling ominously behind his eye.

“Uh-huh,” says Chau. He makes a gesture to the terrified subordinate, who gives a half-bow then darts from the room. “Anything else?”

“It _hurts_ ,” Doctor Gottlieb says. “Everything hurts. It’s bright, and sharp, and the walls look like glass but they won’t break and there are people but I can’t see their faces—”

“Accent? Language?”

“English. I… I think. It’s hard to… I think… He got too close, and… and there was a crack. When he hit the wall. He didn’t move after and, and they have—” He makes a gesture, something long. “Spears. Harpoons. Something. Electrified. It _hurts_.”

Vi makes a choked sound. Doctor Ng gives her shoulder a squeeze. Reassuring Vi or reassuring herself, Vi isn’t sure.

“Hm.” If Chau is bothered, he’s incredibly calm about it. Vi wonders if he’s used to this, to being the eye of the storm. “Electrified harpoons are whaling kit. Commercial. Not specific enough. Something else.”

“I…” Doctor Gottlieb squeezes his eyes shut. Blood leaks from he corners as he does. “Gas,” he says. “I… it smells like HC-Orange/34.”

Vi has no idea what that is, but it makes Chau’s eyebrows hike. “You _sure_?”

Doctor Gottlieb nods. “I… Newt’s sense of smell was always good, even before…” He cuts himself off, wincing, hand pressed against his forehead. Vi doesn’t need to be fluent in German to know what the next words mean.

“Here,” Chau has poured a glass of something dark and alcoholic. He hands it to Doctor Gottlieb, who throws it back in one swig, and holds out the glass for more. “HC-Orange is used to neutralize Kaiju Blue,” Chau tells Vi, voice light and conversational. “The number is the batch generation. Thing is, 33 is the latest that’s available on the open market. Even I can’t get 34 in quantity.” A pause, and he turns back to Doctor Gottlieb. “Is Newt _sure_ it’s 34?”

“Yes. Yes, absolutely, he… For god’s sake, he developed it. He knows what it smells like.”

“It’s manufactured out of EBERL,” Chau adds.

“… Oh,” says Vi.

Oh indeed.

“It’s not what you’re thinking,” Doctor Gottlieb says. “They weren’t Corps.”

“Sure about that?” Hannibal isn’t, by the sound of it.

But Doctor Gottlieb nods. “Protocols are wrong. And the 34…” He sighs. “We’re in an arms race. The HC-Orange, the generations are specific, not necessarily superior. Newton designed 34 to neutralize the remains from the latest K12 virus strains. Newton is a living example of the initial K1Q1 outbreak. By kaiju standards his toxicity is minimal, but it exists. And HC-Orange/26 is the correct agent to neutralize it.” Which, okay. Explains the big box in the lab back at the Shatterdome with “EMERGENCY O26” written on the side. “A detachment from EBERL would know that.”

“So who has access to EBERL resources without being Corps?” Vi asks.

“Quite.”

“Governments,” is Chau’s answer. “Explains why we couldn’t dig up anything from our suppliers. People don’t need to buy what they already have.”

“Which government?” Vi, Vi thinks, is a biology graduate. She came to K-Lab to do kaiju research with the world’s leading experts. Discussing state-sponsored kidnapping in the den of a black market dealer wasn’t really how she’d be expecting to fill her days.

God. What’s she going to tell mum?

“I don’t care which government,” is Doctor Gottlieb’s opinion. “I want Newton back.” His face is still a mess but he’s sounding more like himself, more clipped and wound. “I… hnngh.” He digs his thumbs into his eye sockets for a moment, leaving big smears of blood across his cheeks. “There are other details. Newton… he had the same idea. About the Pons. They transported him in a crate, so he doesn’t know exactly where he is. But he’s been trying to pay attention to everything he can. It’s all a mess. I need a moment to… ” A pause. “He thinks he killed a man. He didn’t mean to.”

“Serves that man right,” comes the clipped voice of Doctor Ng. “Electrified harpoons!” She makes a disgusted noise. Vi doesn’t disagree. She’d probably kill someone who tried jabbing her with harpoons, too, electrified or not.

“It’s like I can still feel him,” Doctor Gottlieb says.

“Ghost-Drift?” ask Vi. Everyone knows about Ghost-Drift. It’s part of what makes the mythology around piloting Jaegers so romantic. Literally so; there’s a new film about it at least every six months. Personally, Vi had always doubted it was real. Now… not so much. Especially not when Doctor Gottlieb nods.

“We can use that,” Chau says. “Would you know if you were close to him?”

“I… Don’t know,” says Doctor Gottlieb. “I can’t use it like… like a tracking beacon, if that’s what you’re implying.”

“But Newt could,” says Chau. “He’s kaiju. I’ve seen them do it before.”

“Possibly. The hive mind… the kaiju have more instinctive aptitude with the Drift than humans do. But Newton severs his k-lobe to cut him off from exactly that.”

“Up until yesterday you’d had a twenty-four-seven psychic link with him for years,” Chau points out. “Trust me. This will work. Now. Go back to the beginning, and tell me _everything_.”

* * *

Two hours later, they have a plan.

“No. Absolutely not. This is a terrible plan.”

They have a plan, they just don’t have agreement from Doctor Gottlieb.

Chau is pretty sure he knows the ship Doctor Geiszler’s being held on. Once he knew what to tell his people to look for, they’d come back to him within the hour.

It also helped that the people who’d loaded Doctor Geiszler on board had done it with a hood over his head.

“The glowing marks on his chest and haunches,” Doctor Gottlieb had explained, “are eyes. Not as acute as his primary set, but good enough.” Vi makes a mental note never to make sarcastic gestures while standing behind Doctor Geiszler.

She also wonders what kind of kaiju Doctor Geiszler actually _is_. Because the kaiju are weapons, and they all have functions. Doctor Geiszler is small, fast, amphibious, intelligent, and has a set of arms proportioned to manipulate objects in the human world. Not to mention the whole neural parasite thing. The words “stealth infiltration and espionage” spring to Vi’s mind. She doesn’t say them out loud. She’s sure they’re not original thoughts. No one would be here if they were.

“Ana, help Ms. Lee get ready,” Chau is saying, gesturing to an assistant even as he ignores Doctor Gottlieb’s objections.

“Hannibal—”

“Enough, Hermann. You’ve done your part. Now it’s my turn.”

“Hannibal, she’s a biology graduate for godsake. She _my_ biology graduate. I refuse to let you involve her in this.”

“Um,” says Vi. “Actually, I work for Doctor Geiszler. And… I’m still here. I can do this.”

This earns her a scornful look from Doctor Gottlieb. “You certainly have his death wish.” He sighs, rubs at his head again. Honestly, Vi thinks this comment is hypocritical, coming from a man who looks about one sharp push from death himself. Vi’s seen him down at least three glasses of cognac, she’s pretty sure he’s lost vision in one eye, his skin’s nearly as grey as Doctor Geiszler’s, and he’s running a fever. The latter’s caused him, for the first time Vi’s seen, to remove his jacket and roll up his sleeves.

He has tattoos. Extensively so, to the point where there’s no uninked skin from his wrists on up. Doctor Gottlieb doesn’t seem like the kind of man who’d have tattoos—of kaiju, no less—all up his arms. There’s a story there, Vi thinks. She wonders, if she could manage to find a photo of Doctor Geiszler as a human, what his arms would look like.

In the end, Vi goes with Ana. She ends up in a huge room filled with more dresses than she’s ever seen outside a department store.

“You’re Hannibal’s assistant,” Ana says, as she holds up dress after dress in front of Vi. They’re all very… short. And severe. Lots of sharp lines and black. “Your job is to sit there and look hot. Hot, and braindead. Make people underestimate you.”

“Okay,” says Vi.

“It’ll be frustrating.” Ana shoots Vi a look. “At best.”

“I’m a woman in STEM,” Vi says, by way of explanation. “I’m used to it.”

This earns her a grin. “Civil engineer,” Ana admits.

“How’d you end up working for Hannibal Chau. If… you don’t mind me asking.”

“Pays better,” says Ana. “And he keeps his hands to himself and doesn’t expect me to make him coffee. Now, try this one. Dressing room’s that way.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Because we want it all, and we want it now](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTaBYaOkywU).


	5. fresh kaiju blood smells like eau de fuck ur planet and everything on it

“Don’t worry, kid. You’ll do fine. You’re with me.”

Chau grins, gold and red with too many teeth. They’re sitting in the back of a limo, and he’s doing something to a gun. Vi can’t take her eyes off it. Maybe Doctor Gottlieb was right. Maybe she shouldn’t be here. Vi signed on to rescue Doctor Geiszler, not to watch people get shot.

The limo pulls to a stop and the driver rushes around the hold open the door. A blast of hot, wet Hong Kong heat rips right up Vi’s spine, salt-thick and diesel-sharp. Chau helps her out of the car; her dress is too short and her heels are too high, and she’s getting blinded by the evening light reflecting off her own necklace. _Hot and braindead_ , Ana had said, and dressed Vi appropriately. Vi’s fingers tighten around her clutch purse. Inside, she has a makeup kit and a cell phone and something that looks like a charger. It isn’t.

“Plug it in, and it’ll take down any electrical grid it’s connected to,” Chau had told her. Wherever and however Doctor Geiszler is being contained, it involves electricity. They’re hoping that, if they can disconnect the power, the Doctor will be together enough to start rescuing himself.

Kaiju heal fast. And, Vi’s been assured, when Doctor Geiszler gets angry, he can spit literal acid. (“Twelve hundred hundred bucks a loogie,” is Chau’s contribution.)

Chau fed her a glass of champagne in the car. “You know people lie better when they need to piss?” he’d said. “Newt taught me that. Swears it’s true. Science.”

Vi starts feeling the effects halfway up the gangplank. The boat they’re after is a huge, white luxury yacht. Innocuous, in a billionaire way. There’s a helicopter parked on top of it, and the helicopter had given it away; Doctor Geiszler had seen the blurred outlines of the rotors with his tertiary eyes. Not that many superyachts with helicopters parked on the top in Hong Kong, as it turned out.

Alcohol, a miniskirt, stilettos, and a boat. Not a great combination, and if Vi ends up walking with more of an ass-shaking sway in her step than usual, then maybe that was part of the point.

Their arrival has been announced. There are people waiting for them. Hannibal talks, fast. Something about wanting to do a deal.

“I think,” he says, “you don’t know what you’ve got. Not really. But I do.”

They’re allowed on board. Hannibal makes a show of sniffing at a smear on one wall. “HC-Orange,” he says. “34, if I’m not mistaken. You guys really don’t know shit about what you’re doing, do you?”

Vi tries not to feel the sweat dripping down her back, down the crack in her ass in a decidedly unsexy way. It’s not all from the heat. There is a stink on the deck, beyond the usual harbor smell of pollution and slowly rotting fish. Vi knows the smell from the lab; it’s the reek of decomposing kaiju.

 _Just a little bit longer,_ she thinks, even if there’s no one there to hear.

* * *

They get taken to a small room. Patted down, a woman running her hands across Vi’s breasts and between her thighs with airport-level disinterest. The man searching Chau finds three guns and a knife, and Chau grins and says, “Can’t blame a guy for being cautious.”

The woman checking Vi pulls all the items out of her purse, then puts them all back in and returns it. She’s obviously decided Vi isn’t the dangerous one. Vi’s fairly certain that’s the point.

They’re left alone. Less than ten minutes later, the boat’s engine starts up in full, and they’re pulling out of the harbor. Chau huffs, but says nothing, so Vi says nothing in return. Just pulls the phone out of her purse and starts to play _Super Jaeger Smash!_.

The phone’s already down to fifty percent battery, and SJS is a notorious power drain. Vi tries not to let her sweating palms leave damp smears across the screen. She was always rubbish at SJS. Not her sort of game, just like it’s not her sort of phone.

She puts the phone away when the door unlocks, and a man walks in. He’s white, a little younger than Chau and a thousand times colder. He’s wearing a suit like a man who’s unsure how to, and his hair is military buzz cut short. When he speaks, it’s English, but his accent is strange. Nothing Vi can place.

He talks with Chau; Vi isn’t even introduced. The man gives his name as John Stone and Vi is one hundred percent certain, by the way he says it, that it’s an alias.

“I didn’t sign up for a cruise,” is Chau’s opening line.

“Just a precaution,” says the self-appointed John Stone. “You’ll be returned to shore when our business has concluded.” He smiles, like mummified skin stretched over bone. Vi thinks of Doctor Geiszler’s gape-maw grin, with its three inch bioluminescent teeth and ability to bite through steel. She knows she would take that smile over John Stone any day.

Chau and Stone discuss Doctor Geiszler, although they’re both pretending that they’re not. Chau’s gambit is that Stone doesn’t know exactly what it is they have in their hold. “You think it’s a kaiju, a juvenile maybe.” Chau grins his car salesman grin. “I’ll tell you one thing for free: I’ve been up close and personal with a baby kaiju and, buddy, let me tell you. You ain’t seen one.” Vi is pretty sure Chau is bluffing, because she’s pretty sure kaiju don’t breed. Pretty sure. She’ll make sure to ask Doctor Geiszler about it, when they get him out of here. Which they’re absolutely about to do.

“Mr. Chau, sir?” Vi says, right on queue. “I need a restroom. I’m sorry, but the champagne…” She speaks in Cantonese, as per the plan. Anyone listening with half a clue would know her accent’s wrong, but Stone doesn’t so much as blink.

“Bathroom for the girl?” Chau says. He shrugs, big and dramatic. “Women, right?”

Vi can _see_ Stone come to the decision, looking between herself and Chau. Then he gestures, apparently to nobody. A moment later, the door opens and the pat-down woman enters.

 _Shit,_ thinks Vi. _Shit shit shit._ Is her escort gonna watch her pee? That’d be awkward.

The escort does not, in fact, watch Vi pee, but does stand outside the bathroom door holding a rather large rifle, which is almost as bad. And Vi, who was busting like five seconds ago, suddenly finds herself bladder-shy.

 _You can do this,_ she tells herself, dress hiked up, underwear around her ankles. _Pee, charge your phone, put on makeup. That’s all._

Somewhere down below, beneath the rumble of the engines, Vi thinks she hears a roar.

She does what she has to do, feels better afterwards, then spends far too long trying to rearrange the dress into some sense of modesty. She’s pretty sure the seams on her stocking are crooked. Ana helped her put them on before. Vi isn’t really a stockings kind of girl.

_Stop procrastinating. You know what to do. Just do it._

Her hands shake when she washes them. So hard it makes unzipping her purse difficult. She’s got no idea how anyone expects her to put on eyeliner like this.

One emergency makeup kit, one nearly de-charged phone, one wall-charger-that-isn’t. There’s a power outlet next to the bathroom’s basin. There’s _always_ a power outlet next to the bathroom basin; that’s how they knew the plan would work. Well, that’s how Chau was confident. Doctor Gottlieb had muttered things in German and rubbed his brow a lot.

Vi connects the phone, then plugs in the not-charger. Nothing happens, which is expected. “It’s on a timer,” Chau had explained. “So you’re not the first and most obvious thing they shoot.”

Very carefully, Vi rests her clutch on the basin so it’s covering the power outlet. That hadn’t been part of the plan, but she’s mildly proud of thinking of it. Then she takes the make-up case, and starts trying not to stab herself in the eye with a mascara wand.

She’s still doing that, in fact, when the engine does go dead, at a randomly determined number of minutes between three and twelve later (it’s about seven, Vi checks on the phone, and they are the longest seven minutes of her life). As soon as the engine stops, so does the power, and so do the lights; the bathroom plunged into a darkness illuminated by nothing other than the phone’s dim screen.

Outside, Vi hears a lot of yelling. Thirty seconds later, the gunshots start. Then the roaring. It’s very, very definitely kaiju roaring. Vi’s only ever heard recordings before, but the sound is distinctive.

She did lock the bathroom door behind her. Still, it isn’t a surprise when the handle starts rattling. Vi hears her escort shouting on the far side, “Hey! What’re you doing in there?”

Vi takes stock of what she’s got, which isn’t much. She palms the powder compact, then opens the door, smiling big and vacant.

“What happened to the lights?” she asks, in Cantonese, because it seems like the sort of thing someone who hadn’t just caused a blackout would ask. “Is everything okay?”

“Fuck,” says the woman with the gun. “Of course you don’t fucking speak English.” She grabs Vi’s arm. “Come with me, you cheap geisha bitch.”

Vi feels a muscle under her eye twitch, just once. Somewhere down below her, Doctor Geiszler roars. Somewhere up above, people are shooting Hannibal Chau. And in between, Vi takes her powder compact, and throws it right into the face of one racist, gun-toting asshole.

It’s loose powder. Mineral, expensive. Designed to be non-allergenic so it’s not like a face-full of mace or anything. Still, it sends the woman staggering backwards in shock, and Vi follows it up with the heel of her hand, jammed into the woman’s nose. Mostly because she read about the move on the internet. She thinks.

Or rather, she doesn’t think. She just turns and runs, heedless of the way her skirt isn’t designed for it (she’ll have to mention that to Ana when she gets back, alive, which is totally going to happen). She ditches the stilettos as soon as she rounds a corner, tries not to listen to the outraged yelling or the way bullets thud heavy into the wall behind her.

The ship is dark and chaotic, dead in the water and lurching from the swell. People are moving, all around, and Vi avoids them, ducking away from the beams of flashlights, down corridors and, on two instances, into a cupboard.

She heads down. She can hear Doctor Geiszler, and he’s below her. Not happy, from the sound of him, and the closer she gets, the more Vi thinks she can hear a heavy thudding in between the roars. Like something the approximate size and weight of a small car throwing itself against a wall, over and over.

When Vi finds the door, she knows she’s in the right place. Unlike every other door on the ship, this one’s locked, a keypad glimmering LEDs even in the darkness. A secondary power source. Vi swears, is trying to think of how to open it when a hand closes on her shoulder. She screams, turns, finds herself face-to-face with a extremely startled man in a lab coat. He’s young, and pretty, and reeks of kaiju blood. Vi hates him instantly.

“What are you doing here?” he demands. He has a pass card clipped to his lapel. Photo ID with a name: CARSON, M.

Vi makes a decision.

“They sent me up,” she says, still in Cantonese. “Please, you have to help me. It’s a mess down there”—she points to the closed door—“there’s Kaiju Blue everywhere, we’ve run out of HC-Orange. They sent me to get more.” She makes sure to say the key words in English: Kaiju Blue, HC-Orange.

Carson, M.’s eyes flick between her and the door, then back again. Vi does her best to look frightened and disheveled, which honestly isn’t difficult.

“Right,” says Carson, after a moment. “Right. Come with me.” Then he’s dragging her down the corridor, away from the door, into another room. A storeroom, by the looks of it.

Carson goes to a set of crates along one wall, begins rummaging around inside. “God, this had all better be fucking worth it,” he mutters, not to Vi. “Such a mess. Not what I fucking signed up for.” His hands are shaking so badly he has trouble unlatching the box.

Vi feels sorry for him. Maybe. Just a little.

“Here.” And then he’s handing her a canister. It looks, Vi thinks, like a fire extinguisher. Looks like a fire extinguisher, except it has HC-Orange/34 written on the side in big block letters. “Go on,” Carson says. “Take it.”

Vi does. “Thanks, mate,” she says. Then slams the canister into the side of Carson’s head.

He goes down, hard. There’s blood, a lot of blood, and part of Vi is screaming. Part of her is screaming, and another part is focused on the sound of Doctor Geiszler, roaring just past the bulkhead.

“Fuck,” she says. “Fuck.” She takes Carson’s lab coat and his ID pass. “I’m sorry. I hope you don’t die,” Vi tells his hopefully-just-unconscious body. “But… Next time, don’t mess with my lab supervisor!”

God. Doctor Geiszler better give her the _best_ fucking probation performance write-up ever in the history of time. Seriously.

Vi leaves Carson, takes the canister of HC-Orange, and returns to the door. Carson’s card opens it, locks disengaging and thick metal swooshing open. From inside, Vi is hit with the smell of kaiju so powerful it makes her eyes water. Once, when Vi complained about the smell of the tissue samples they worked with in K-Lab, Doctor Geiszler had countered that she should be grateful they weren’t working with fresh stuff. _fresh kaiju blood smells like eau de fuck ur planet and everything on it_ , he’d told her. He had not, as it turned out, been being hyperbolic.

Past the door, is a small lab. About half a dozen people are clustered around in the darkness, illuminated by dim emergency lighting and phone flashlights. They all turn when Vi enters.

“Who’re—?” is as far as one gets.

“I’ve got the HC-Orange,” Vi says, in English, when she rushes in. She holds up the canister in proof.

“What?”

“For the kaiju,” Vi says. “Carson said you needed extra.”

“I—” says the lab tech. He’s cut off by another terrible crash, and this time Vi _feels_ it, through the floor. There’s something at the far end of the lab Vi had thought was a powered down flatscreen, and turns out to be a window. A window smeared so thick with kaiju blood it looks black in the darkness, but Vi can see the glowing orbs of Doctor Geiszler’s eyes when he throws himself against it. There aren’t as many as there should be. Vi really, really hopes they regenerate.

The crash distracts the scientists, who turn away from Vi and back to their consoles. “For fuck’s sake,” yells the one who’d addressed Vi. “Zap it! Do _something_!”

“Fucking power’s still fucking out!” says someone else.

“Will the door—?” Then a scream, when there’s a bright flash of bioluminescence from Doctor Geiszler, and a second later the cell window is splattered by glowing blue.

“Fuck! Acid! No one told us it spits acid!”

“They all spit acid, you fucking idiot! Everyone knows that!”

This isn’t true, but Vi doesn’t mention as much. Instead, she’s looking at the cell door. It, too, is locked. Hasn’t been opened by the power outage. It’s not like the main lab door; there’s no handy swipe card reader next to it. Vi has no idea how it opens.

She bites her lip, looks up. Finds what she needs on the ceiling.

It’s a long shot, a guess. And if Vi’s wrong? Well. Then she’s in a lot of trouble. She has a canister of HC-Orange in her hand and the memory of the night before exam week in her head. The one where some asshole in the uni dorms would, without fail, set off the fire alarms. A blast of deodorant on the detectors would do it, every time.

Fire doors, Vi knows, are designed to fail _open_.

She points the HC-Orange canister upwards, and pulls the trigger.

“What the hell are you—?” is as far as the lab tech gets, before every fire alarm on the ship starts shrieking. Even with the noise, Vi can hear the heavy _thunk_ as the cell door unbolts.

 _Thank you, international safety standards,_ she thinks.

“Oh _fuck_!” says someone else.

This time, when Doctor Geiszler throws himself against the door, the entire thing goes flying across the lab. Vi barely jumps out of the way in time, and then suddenly she’s getting jostled from all sides as every single other person in the room attempt to flee.

If Vi thought the smell of kaiju was bad before, now it’s unbearable. So is the noise, a real-deal kaiju roar, not dampened by steel and glass. Vi screams, drops the canister and covers her ears. She feels the floor shake as Doctor Geiszler takes the half-leap across it, then a claw the size of her entire torso closes around her.

“Doctor Geiszler! Doctor Geiszler, it’s me! It’s Vivian!”

Three eyes regard her, bleary and unfocused. Doctor Geiszler is hurt, badly. Oozing dully glowing blue onto the floor. It hisses and bubbles against the Lino, and the fumes make Vi choke.

There’s one awful, terrible moment where Vi considers the very real possibility she might die. Crushed to death by a pain-mad kaiju’s claw. One moment, and then she hears Doctor Geiszler give a surprised huff.

He takes a half-step back. The claw doesn’t leave Vi, but something about it relaxes. Reassuring, not threatening.

When Vi dares open her eyes, Doctor Geiszler has a quizzical look and one of his small arms raised into a peace sign. No, not a peace sign. A letter V.

Vi laughs. “Yes,” she says. “It’s Vi.”

Doctor Geiszler sighs. Sits back on his haunches and rubs at his face with his big arms. Like that, he’s tall enough that his head is pressed against the ceiling.

Soon, he’s started making gestures with his small arms, fast and furious, and Vi has to stutter an apology. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I don’t speak sign language. But we’re here to rescue you. We have to go.” They’ve scared off the scientists, for now. But Vi would bet they’ll be back soon. And this time, they’ll bring the people with the guns. Or, worse, the harpoons.

Doctor Geiszler’s remaining eyes go wide at the sound of “we”. He holds up one finger on his small hands, putting his big hands against his hips. Then he makes a series of odd gestures: shaping a bowl with his hands, putting it on his head, scowling, walking with a cane, and—

“Oh! Doctor Gottlieb. He’s safe. He’s back with Mr. Chau’s people.”

Which earns her an odd sort of slurping hissing noise, as if Doctor Geiszler is eating something very quickly.

“Yes,” Vi says. “He’s here, on the ship somewhere. I think… I think they might be shooting at him? We have to… we have to go find him.” Before she’s really thought about it, she’s grabbed at one of Doctor Geiszler’s arms. He pulls back, hissing, and she startles. “Sorry! Sorry, I didn’t mean—”

But he’s pointing at the Kaiju Blue, slowly eating its way through the floor. Right. Kaiju are toxic. Vi probably shouldn’t get her skin covered in his blood.

Doctor Geiszler gestures for her to get back, and she obeys, watching as he picks up the canister of HC-Orange. When he points it at himself and turns it on, Vi shrieks. Just a little.

It really does have a very distinctive smell. Better to Vi’s nose than to to Doctor Geiszler’s, if his quite alarming-sounding coughing is anything to go by.

The HC-Orange also solidifies his oozing blood, hardening it in into a silver-white crust that flakes off like glittery snow when he moves. “It doesn’t just neutralize the Blue,” Vi says, when Doctor Geiszler’s done spraying himself down. “It… it seals the wounds. It’s a healing agent!” This earns her a wink and a set of gun fingers, and Vi wonders how long that’s been the case, that the HC-Orange is designed to help kaiju as well as humans. She’s guessing, if she did tests, she wouldn’t find it to be true on anything with a generation number lower than twenty-six.

After that, Doctor Geiszler is moving, peering out the doorway, gesturing for Vi to follow. The ship doorways are narrow, and Vi has one panicky thought that Doctor Geiszler won’t fit. But, no. He squeezes through like a fluffy cat through a fence, and Vi has half an instant to be impressed before they’re off, running through the corridors.

“Up!” she calls. “We were up.”

Up, there’s gunfire, which Doctor Geiszler discovers when he rounds a corner and is greeted by a hail of bullets. Vi shrieks, but Doctor Geiszler seems unharmed, despite the fact she can hear the shrapnel hitting his carapace.

Vi hears someone shout, “Fuck, it’s the kaiju! It’s loose!” And then Doctor Geiszler’s big hands are on her shoulders, his small hands making gestures Vi doesn’t understand. Then they’re picking her up, and she finds herself nose-to-dimly-glowing-ocellus with the chest of a kaiju.

Vi’s first thought is that the underside of Doctor Geiszler really is quite soft. He’s running through the ship corridors, protecting Vi’s vulnerable human skin with his own tough kaiju hide, and the feel of the way his muscles move beneath the dappled grey of that hide is _fascinating_. Scientifically fascinating, Vi is quick to mentally amend. Not… not in a weird way! Doctor Geiszler has Doctor Gottlieb and—

Ahem. Anyway. Science!

Vi ends up hanging on by gripping the edges of Doctor Geiszler’s collarbone. She doesn’t want to wrap her arms around his neck, not with the bullets, and it’s not that she think he’ll drop her, it’s just…

… just…

Okay. Okay, she’s copping a feel. Just a little bit. In a science way, not a sexy way. The guy is trying to stop her getting shot, but holy shit she’s _touching a kaiju_! If she turns her head, she can see the fingers of his small hand, curled around her shoulder. It’s proportioned more like a salamander’s than a human’s, slightly webbed and tipped with a tiny, dark claws. Long-fingered, though, bigger than Vi’s if they were pressed against each other, and— whoa!

Doctor Geiszler’s chest lights up in a flash of bright blue bioluminescence, and Vi feels the muscles contract sharply. The acrid kaiju-smell returns, and Vi hears the doppler of someone screaming as they run past. An acid spit!

A second later, they’re out on the deck; Vi feels the change in the air, feels the sea breeze against her skin. She thinks Doctor Geiszler lunges to the edge, looks over the railing and considers jumping into the sea, but he’s interrupted by another hail of gunfire.

He makes a startled growl, lurching sideways in a roll that leave Vi concentrating less on anatomy and more on not throwing up all over her supervisor. Then there’s another staccato bullet-call, followed by an oddly rhythmic bass pulsing, and a voice from above yells:

“Hey, kid. Up here!”

Vi feels the muscles in Doctor Geiszler’s legs tense, and that’s the only warning she gets before her body is rocketed up three stories, leaving her stomach flailing down below.

When Doctor Geiszler puts her down on the deck, Vi’s own legs give out. She’s caught by another set of hands, human and weighed down by too many heavy gold rings.

“I’ll take the girl in the chopper. Can you make it to shore on your own?” says the voice of Hannibal Chau, very close to Vi’s ear.

She can see motion out of the corner of her eye; Doctor Geiszler signing something. It must be affirmative, because Chau nods. Then his hands are fumbling with the clasp of Vi’s borrowed necklace.

“Here.” Chau hands the ostentatious coil of diamonds and gold to Doctor Geiszler. He gets a sarcastic-looking set of signs in response, which: “You’re an idiot. It’s a tracking device. Head for a beach, my people will pick you up. Good luck, kid.”

Then there’s the sound of heavy footsteps, and a dark streak, leaping off the side of the boat. Doctor Geiszler hits the water below with barely a ripple. Vi catches a glimpse of a his blue glow, eeling back and forth like an iguana. Then he’s gone.

“I’ve seen him out-swim a speedboat,” Chau says. “He’ll be back before we are. C’mon.”

Vi finds herself hauled up into the helicopter. Things are starting to feel very strange, disassociated in some way. “You’re going into shock,” Chau says, still conversational, as he straps Vi in a puts a helmet over her head. “Don’t worry about it. You did great.” There’s something hypnotic about the way the rotors are whirring.

“I’ve never been in a helicopter before,” Vi says, or tries to. She’s not sure if she manages to get all the words out.

“First time for everything.” Chau is firing out the window as he says it. Vi wonders how she can hear him speak, before realizing there’s a headset in the helmet.

“I’m afraid of flying.”

There’s a lurch, another burst of gunfire, and then they’re airborne.

“No,” says Hannibal Chau. “You’re afraid of crashing.”

Vi doesn’t remember much else until they get back to the city.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I saw his body thrashing 'round  
> I saw his pulse rate going down  
> I saw him in convulsive throws  
> I said ["I'll have one of those"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-mLIdLZZeI).


	6. A+++ would not die again highly recommended

They get back to K2 before Doctor Geiszler, but only because his van gets stuck in traffic. Chau, meanwhile, lands on his own roof.

When they descend into the building, Vi’s head still feels hazy, stuffed with cotton and boxed behind glass. It occurs to her to wonder how long it was since she last slept.

“I’ll arrange for someone to take you home,” she remembers Chau saying. “Then, in a day or two, when you’re alive again, we should do lunch. I have a—” is as far as he gets before Doctor Ng appears, wide-eyed and red faced.

“Sir,” she says. “Did you find him? Did you find Doctor Geiszler?”

Chau scowls at her distress. “He’s on his way. What’s happened?”

“It’s Doctor Gottlieb,” says Doctor Ng. “He went into seizure fifteen minutes ago. It… We think it’s the Pons. It doesn’t look good.”

* * *

It doesn’t look good.

Vi cries, because she doesn’t know what else to do. She’s not even a science doctor, let alone a medical one. Doctor Gottlieb looks so small and so frail, strapped to a stretcher, thrashing like a lose firehose.

“Doctor Cheng was on roster,” Doctor Ng says. “And we’ve called in Doctor Jeon, he’ll be here in five. But Doctor Geiszler is the expert. We just… we don’t know what to do.” Doctor Ng is a science doctor, she looks as distraught as Vi feels. “Hannibal, this is my fault, if I hadn’t let him—”

“Don’t.” Chau holds up a hand to silence her. “Don’t blame yourself. He knew the risks.” He hands Vi another tissue. His arm is around her shoulder and she’s leaving snot all over his velvet jacket. Chau is big and solid and alive and smells like camphor and kaiju blood. His fingers hurt where they grip against her skin. Vi isn’t sure if he’s comforting her or if she’s comforting him.

They know the exact moment Doctor Geiszler returns because the ground starts shaking from his running. There’s a bellowing noise, and a series of huge booms as he crashes through doors on the way to the surgery. When he enters, his feet lose traction on the tiles and he goes skidding into a cupboard, sending a cascade of scissors and bandages and scalpels down onto his head. He doesn’t even seem to notice.

The medical team clustered around Doctor Gottlieb do, and as soon as Doctor Geiszler is back on his feet again, he’s surrounded by people in scrubs waving charts and scans. There’s a big machine in the room, hooked up to Doctor Gottlieb, and Vi doesn’t understand what it’s displaying only that it looks very red and very unstable. Doctor Geiszler—who’s a science doctor and a medical doctor _and_ a medical science doctor, near as Vi can remember—does seem to understand what he’s looking at. He falls to his knees, all four hands gripping at his head, and gives such a mournful bellow that half the doctors in the room start to sob.

Vi and Chau watch it all from the viewing gallery, above the surgery. They see Doctor Geiszler crumple—go entirely still, even his skin dark and lifeless—for one long, awful second. Then two. Then three.

And then he bursts back into light and life, bioluminescence going crazy even as he lurches around the room. He grabs handfuls of things Vi can’t properly make out from the distance; hypodermics and gauze pads and vials and a bottle of something purple. He grabs all of that, then he tears the wires and the restraints from the still-seizuring Doctor Gottlieb, much to the consternation of the medical team.

They’re even less enthused when Doctor Geiszler picks Doctor Gottlieb up, and then vanishes through a door at the back of the surgery. The slam is hard enough to send another cascade of equipment tumbling to the ground.

For a moment, no one moves. Then Vi feels the chest beneath her cheek begin to rumble. A moment later, Hannibal Chau is laughing; big, huge, rolling peals of it. Happy.

“M-Mr. Chau?” Vi says.

“C’mon, kid.” Chau slaps her on the shoulder, twice, then he stands. “We’re done here. Got a feeling everything is gonna turn out just fine.” He’s grinning, pulling a cigar out of his jacket and sticking the end between his teeth.

“Mr. Chau?”

“Syringes, morphine, half our supply of the first generation k-vaccine, and Astroglide,” Chau says. “I told ya, kid. Pure Blue’s amazing stuff, if you don’t mind the side effects. And from what I hear, Hermann sure as hell doesn’t.”

It takes Vi a moment to put two and two together, but when she does, the red in her cheeks has nothing to do with the crying. “Oh!”

Chau just laughs.

* * *

“I won’t lie, Vivian, it’ll be a shame to see you go.”

Marshal Hansen has the most hilariously bogan accent Vi has heard in years. It’s, like, American-made film bad. Not the sort of thing she expected to encounter in the middle of Hong Kong, that’s for sure.

The accent also makes it difficult to take him seriously, which is a shame, because he’s sitting across a desk not three feet away, watching Vi with grave authority. Up until this morning, the man was her boss.

“Can I ask what prompted the decision?” he’s saying. “I thought working with the team in K-Science was your dream job. I know things can get… intense down there. If there’s anything I can do to make things easier for you…?”

Vi gives him a nervous smile. The Marshal’s accent is hilarious, but people seem to think he’s an okay guy. So:

“Oh,” she says. “It’s nothing like that. Having the chance to work with Doctors Gottlieb and Geiszler has been a dream come true.”

“I won’t lie,” Marshal Hansen says. “We’ve been trying to recruit into K-Lab for years. We’ve got no shortage of applicants. But it can be… interesting to try and find someone who can… fit in with the team. Your last probation report was particularly… impressive. That’s… unusual.” Marshal Hansen talks like a man who’s used to swearing a lot, and has suddenly found himself in a position where he can’t. Vi tries not to smile too much at the thought.

Her last “probation report”, written in Doctor Geiszler’s near-illegible handwriting (“No, it was always like that,” according to Doctor Gottlieb), read, in full: _id be dead if not for this chick. A+++ would not die again highly recommended_

“I’m really sorry to go,” says Vi, which is a lie. “I just… got an offer elsewhere.” Which isn’t.

Marshal Hansen looks at her for a long time, and Vi thinks his stare feels like warm VB and burnt sausages. Finally he says, “We’ve been press-ganged into a war we were never trained to fight. I suppose to win it, we all need to make the decisions we feel are the right ones.”

“Um, yes sir,” says Vi, because it seems to be the expected response.

Marshal Hansen just sighs a secret-keeper’s sigh.

* * *

Doctors Geiszler and Gottlieb are waiting for her by the exit. The latter is looking better, although his eye is still grody and he’s leaning heavily both on his cane and on Doctor Geiszler’s arm. At least until Doctor Geiszler’s arm joins its three equivalents in being wrapped around Vi.

“He says thank you,” says Doctor Gottlieb. “For everything.” A pause, then an eye-roll and: “He’d like you to know the exact wording was, ‘thanks for everything, dude’.” Doctor Gottlieb says the word “dude” like it physically pains him.

“Thank you,” Vi says, when Doctor Geiszler has put her feet back on the ground and she can breathe again. She shakes Doctor Gottlieb’s hand, mostly because he doesn’t seem the hugging type. “It’s been… interesting.” To use the Marshal’s word.

“I’m sure we’ll be seeing you soon,” Doctor Gottlieb says in response, the corner of his lips quirking up, just slightly.

“It’s a small city,” Vi lies.

“Indeed.”

She waves at them once more as she leaves the Shatterdome. Then she’s gone.

* * *

There’s a limo waiting for her out front, driver standing holding the door open. In the back, Vi finds a bottle of chilled champagne and a TV. Vi drinks the champagne and watches the TV. It’s showing blurry cellphone footage of what, to her, is quite obviously Doctor Geiszler, running through a Hong Kong street. The caption beneath reads: PPDC SILENT ON NEW KAIJU THREAT.

Doctor Geiszler had been stuck in traffic when he’d felt Doctor Gottlieb go into seizure, thanks to the Ghost-Drift. He’d burst out of the van, much to the consternation of Chau’s people, and had run the rest of the way back to the lab, much to the consternation of Marshal Hansen’s.

 _got threatened with court marshal,_ he’d told Vi later. _but what were they gonna do? cut my funding? ooohh nooooo negative zero dollars save me!!! let me just sell another kidney, ive only got like six_

Despite his miraculous not being dead-ness, Doctor Gottlieb had not approved, but that went without saying.

* * *

Hannibal Chau and Doctor Fiona Ng are waiting for her when she walks in.

“Welcome to K2, Ms. Lee,” says Doctor Ng. “We’re so glad you chose to join us.”

Things get better from there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [OH THANK GO IT'S OVER](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV51gU00oqc)!
> 
> Srsly IDEK either. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯


End file.
